Most
of this material comes from a work written by a guy named Michael Hunt, who
analyzed the shadow of history and how it impacts (or does not impact) the way
China views the world today. Central to his point is that China’s long history
and philosophical traditions pull Chinese foreign policy in several directions,
making analysis more tricky than at first glance.
Where
do analysts, Western and non-Western, look to when they study China?
Well,
many professors, hacksters and other people tend to point at three
traditions which have historically informed how China deals with the rest of
the world. The first is the Marxist-Leninist tradition, which emphasized world revolution,
ideological orthodoxy and the overthrowing of the capitalist world. The second
is China’s imperial tradition of maintaining tributary states in East and
Southeast Asia, with smaller states recognizing China’s moral superiority in
exchange for access to trade and titles by the Chinese emperor. What is rarely
discussed with regard to this tradition is the fact that the Chinese state has
traditionally split the periphery into “near” and “far”; the “far” periphery was
entangled in the tributary system, whereas the “near” periphery was dealt with
by colonization and Chinese settlement, backed by military force, turning it
into a buffer zone between the outside world and the “core” of Chinese
civilization. Some may even argue that this strategy has persisted up to the
present day.
A
third tradition is that of the Century of Humiliation (百年国耻). In this view of things, China is a victim. Having
been bullied by the West and the Japanese for years, the country is prickly
about anything to do with national sovereignty and will not take bullying.
China’s goal, under this narrative, is to reclaim its former glory as a nation
and, in the most extreme view, take revenge on the evil outsiders who have been
trying to suppress China for so long.
Therefore,
when people look at China’s behavior in recent decades, they tend to point to
one of the above in explaining it. The Marxist-Leninist explanation has more or
less died out with the collapse of communism, but it is easy enough to paint
all of China’s actions in the framework of the “China as neo-imperial power”
view.
However,
there are other traditions out there which are often forgotten or overlooked.
One
is the “cosmopolitan” tradition in Chinese foreign policy, which stems from the
富国强兵 idea. This strand began in the
late Qing era, and was a very pragmatic approach towards how not to be totally
humiliated by foreigners. Qing-era thinkers such as Xu Jiyu and Liang Qichao
very openly called for learning from other countries in order to strengthen
China. (It is interesting to note the Xu, when analyzing the United States,
concluded that American culture and society represented the Confucian ideal to
a greater extent than that of China!). In opposition to this is a “nativist,
culturally-chauvinist” tradition, which has an interesting populist strand,
namely that in order to drive out the evil foreigners, the Chinese people
should unite and pool their efforts in order to fight and win against the
barbarians. The inherent virtue of the Chinese people and civilization will
prevail. Such thinking led to the Boxer Rebellion; shadows of this thought can
also be found in Maoist writings on the role of the peasantry in revolution.
These two schools of thought were in conflict during the 19th
century, and to a certain extent this debate is still alive today.
Another
strand of thought has its origins in the Warring States Period, and is informed
by the Chinese military classics and popular works such as the Three Kingdoms.
This view stresses, to put it in modern-day language, that “it’s a dog-eat-dog
world out there, and the strong survive and the weak perish”. When Qing China
was facing foreign incursions in the 19th century, several Chinese
analysts likened the state of China in the world then to the situation during
the Warring States Period; therefore, China needed to adopt practical,
Machiavellian strategems of “playing the barbarians off against each other” and
“self-strengthening” in order to survive. This hard-headed, practical,
realistic view of international affairs, where only national interests matter,
is strikingly similar to the Western neo-realist view of the world.
So,
we have here a multiplicity of ideas on how Chinese foreign policy works. How
does this filter through to decision makers?
It
is impossible to get into the head of the people running foreign affairs in
Zhongnanhai. However, after scanning through the list of conflicting ideas and
traditions running through Chinese history, one has to realize that in the
historical scheme of things, Chinese foreign policy cannot be described as
one-dimensional, and the way in which Chinese leaders see the world will be
filtered through several historical lenses. Furthermore, given the opacity of
the Chinese policy world, it is difficult to predict with certainty how any of
this actually plays out.
It’s
hard to untangle the strands sometimes, but China’s long and tangled historical
and philosophical traditions serve to further prove a single point; China, as a
country, is way more complicated than most analysts like to think, and is not easy to pigeonhole.
